Archive for the ‘KOTESOL’ Category

To my dozen(s?) of readers, I will soon be reviewing the sessions I attended at the conference and want to know about other sessions. I review somewhat critically but try to keep focused on the topic. If you think you have what it takes to write Surprisesaplenty-quality material, let me know.

Sorry,

If you think you have what it takes to write Surprisesaplenty-quality material, let me know, please.

Dr. Tim Murphey’s plenary talk is titled: “Drive: Putting Students at the Wheel with Agency, Identity, and Altruism.”
“Once there was a country where there were almost no cars and the people in this country realized that for their growing economy it would be good to have a more mobile population with bus drivers, taxi drivers, and even individual car owners who could get around by themselves. The people in power reasoned . . .” Come to Tim’s talk to find out where we are driving.

Prof. Marc Helgesen’s plenary is titled: “Happiness 2.0: New Ideas from the Science of Well-Being.”
“Happy students learn more, work harder on tasks, and approach those tasks with enthusiasm – all keys to creating and focusing learner drive. Positive Psychology explores happiness, positive emotion, and those things that allow us to flourish.”

At the recent Busan-Kyeongnam KOTESOL meeting, branch president Brad Serl gave a presentation on the new NEAT test. Umm, I may have written ‘test’ twice. I think the test is the “New English Aptitude Test” and it is intended to replace the current English test used in the University Entrance Exam.

There were two stated reasons for changing the test; one reasonable and achievable and the other…not so much.

The test -still three years away from actually being used – requires more English production from the takers and looks to be a better test to prepare for. If you do well on this test, you will likely also do well speaking English. This is good and achievable part.

The second reason for changing the test is to reduce private education expenditures – money to cramming schools or hagwons for English. In discussing this, we -(the people at the meeting consisted of 20+ people, including three Korean teachers of ESL, four to seven university instructors and ten or more middle and high school native English Speaker Teachers) did not think this goal would be achieved. Cynically, the group consensus was that private spending for ESL would likely increase.

How much is spent on private education now? The numbers on the presentation slide below are for private education for children in general so math, Korean language and other languages are included in the totals.

If you are a parent, you will want to be sitting down. If you have a heart condition, go and get your medicine and put it where you can reach it quickly if need be.

If parents paid one million won a month (around $900 US or Canadian) for private education, their child would have an 11% likelihood of qualifying for a Tier one university (Seoul National, KAIST, Yeonsei, maybe one or two others). For even odds of attending a Tier one university, parents need to spend two million won a month…

…

Sorry, I needed to lie down and engage in some calming visualizations there for a moment. Okay, the palpitations have eased.

As I see it, I can either educate my son to the level that he could attend a tier one university or I could save enough money to actually pay for him to attend one. I am not sure that I could do both.

The main suggestions we came up with for teaching students so they can do well on the test were 1) Organize extensive reading programs and 2) teach writing (more). A common complaint at the meeting was that students did not appear to understand how to write more than a sentence at a time in Korean or in English. Teachers will need to work on organizing ideas then on paragraph and essay formation.

As Serl noted, these are good suggestions for teaching ESL regardless of what kind of test there is. To paraphrase, “Teachers complain about ‘teaching to the test’. This isn’t always a bad idea. If the test is a good one, then teaching students how to do well on it improves both the test scores and absolute English proficiency.”

I feel sympathy for Dr Kumaravadivelu. Like “The musician formerly known as Prince”, he name had devolved into a sentence that lazy people used rather than take the effort to work through the seven syllables. I think he was even introduced as “Dr Kumara…whose name I can’t pronounce”. I may have misremembered that but certainly everyone described him that way when mentioning his talks. Justin McNulty, who introduced Kumaravadivelu, was nearly the sole exception went out of his way to pronounce the man’s name repeatedly in his introduction. This prompted the man in front of me to mutter, “show off.”

This is especially ironic as his talk was about using language teaching to transport and share cultural beliefs and practices. Morrison, described (very) briefly in a previous post, discussed how Jin-hye comes to English class and becomes “Jenny” and how this is wrong. I think Kumaravadivelu would agree.

Um, that’s about all I have to say about Kumaravadivelu and his talk. It was moderately interesting but a little too ‘big-think’ for me. I did feel it was particularly appropriate for an Indian to discuss how English is a language of colonialism as well as globalism.

Melissa Shaffer had a seminar on “Blogging and Bravery” and Christie Provenzano displayed a poster on a similar theme.

Here is Provenzano’s display:

Provenzano gave me permission to photograph her poster and I think I asked her if I could post it my blog. If she wants it removed, I’ll pull it down fast!

I have used a teacher’s blog for years and am experimenting with student blogs this semester. I agree with Provenzano that a teacher’s blog is good for “eliminat[ing] the “I was absent so I didn’t know what to do for homework” excuse.” Well, it eliminates the validity of such an excuse but, as a few of us at Dongseo U have noted, it doesn’t eliminate the excuse.

We are wondering, my university coworkers and I, if the online form of notes holds less urgency or importance to the students. Midterm exams just finished and perhaps a tenth of my students admitted that they didn’t visit the website and look at or print out the exam questions. I don’t know how that compares to students in classes where questions and study notes were handed out in paper form in class, but a coworker claimed to see a decline in studying after making the switch to online.

Back to Provenzano. She describes a few forms of blogs her students can use. Group blogs allow students to feel supported by classmates and make it easier for the teacher to find all the content. Individual blogs can carry on after class is completed and allows students to find a unique voice.

She also mentions some gadgets: dropbox and an unnamed one that monitors extensive reading. My photo is terribly blurry but it seems to be a part of library thing (here is a pdf that discusses using librarything for extensive reading) .

Shaffer’s seminar was on Sunday afternoon and was poorly attended although I found her content useful. I am not sure how the ‘bravery’ in “blogging and Bravery” applies. Perhaps everyone can use encouragement now and then.

In her classes, students needed to write one blogpost and two comments a week and were graded as “yes/no”. She compared her desires for the blog component to the desires of Korea coworkers. She wasn’t interested in accuracy or technical skill as much as the Korean English teachers. She was eager to give her students freedom to be creative but the Koreans wondered why the emphasis on creativity and wanted to assign topics. The Koreans, in short, were interested in the product and she was interested in the process.

I feel they were both right regarding creativity. The information I have read suggests a blank page inhibits creativity and that some restrictions enhance it. Assigning topics might have increased creativity.

In her first semester using blogs, she allowed students to use any platform they wanted. Many chose Cyworld, which is a good platform but sometimes annoying for teachers to navigate and use. I personally have had trouble with RSS feeds from cyworld blogs. In her second semester, she used edublogs. Whichever platform used, it is challenging to do this with a large number of students.

Peadar is an acquaintance who has frequently spoken at the Busan Kotesol branch. I don’t know that I have ever heard him speak, though. There’s always been something else going on. He spoke well and I wish I had seen his other talks, including use of comics in class.

This talk was a good bookend with Heidi Nam’s class on checking comprehension. Both describe how we often question students on different subjects then we think. Nam offered a nonsense sentence and asked us what the character was doing. The verb was clear from it’s placement and ‘ed’ ending so we could answer and display our understanding of grammar without understanding the sentence. In the same way, Peadar described the ‘listening window strategy’ (I think the phrase is a direct quote – it is close). When we ask students to fill in the blanks in sentences like ” I went to ____ and ____ a shirt.” students wait for the “to’ and ‘and’ sounds and write down the next word. I was able to do the same thing with a completely nonsense sentence in his class.

Instead of asking for specific words, we should first ask for the main idea, then focus down to specifics. These ideas might fit a ‘T-chart’ – good points and bad points discussed in the audio – or on a mind map.

On the mind map, it is appropriate to do a ‘fill in the blanks’ exercise as the students are not listening for specific words, but ideas or general concepts.

Callaghan offered a hierarchy of activities moving from teacher -created to student-created.

He also suggested a more away from class-wide audio and instead using a number of cheap MP3 players (and split audio so a few students could share one player) to individualize the learning. This was a great, new idea, and one that I had been moving towards in some fashion already. I sometimes bring in a small battery-powered speaker for small groups to listen to.

One activity he had on his slide but didn’t have time to discuss was Audio Relays, an event that has always been enjoyed by my students

As with Sandy and Dudeney, he is eager to help students use their phones in class. I like the idea of having students make MP3s in one class and then students in another class need to listen to them and determine the meaning. This is not an out-of-the-blue activity: students need to be given time to prepare a conversation or interview, possibly have it checked by the teacher, then recorded.

Callaghan suggested the English Language Listening Library Online (elllo.org) as a source for student-created audio.

Digital immigrants see technology as things or nouns. Digital natives see the technologies as processes or verbs.

Should we say digital -immigrants and -natives or -visitors and -residents?

Young people are ‘tech-comfy’ but not always ‘tech-savvy’. They may not know how to use it in the service of learning.

To test our digital literacy or footprint, he asked if we had used various services in the past week. I answered yes to most questions but I noticed that he kept email, Twitter, Facebook update… as separate entities. I feel that is outdated as they are all forms of digital communication. Perhaps they should be grouped or sorted in terms of focus or directedness.

He discussed digital literacy skills and a big one was knowing how to search for information usefully.

One point I wanted to question him on but didn’t have time was the use of smart phones (and tablets) in class. He and Shelly Blake-plock, champion hand held devices in class. I want to, and try to, encourage their use but often find students using internet chat. I do encourage them to use dictionaries and such so I don’t want to (and can’t) completely police phone use. On the other hand, a kid, a mere youngster (of 22 years) could not be pulled away from his chat to participate in class. I resorted to asking him to leave class before he would put his phone away. Anyway, do I need to make my class more interesting? Include more content so looking away would be disastrous? Should students no longer vocally chat with neighbors but SMS with non-continuous classmates instead? Basic conversation classes require conversation but not intense collaboration per se.

In the second talk, he offered a tour of various websites he uses with his students. Lessonstream and photofunia (image featured below) were the big ones and he also pointed us to his presentation slides here (oops, that site no longer seems to be working. Perhaps this is it). UPDATE: Dudeney responded in the comments and his link works. This should, too. Also see the consultants-e.

I liked his use of Wordle – a program that makes word clouds with the more common words larger. I think it would be a useful way to help students know what words they should learn first.

I think Blake-plock (link in earlier paragraph) does a better job of explaining how technology can be used in the classroom, but he has months or years to get his point across at his blog and Dudeney only had an hour and a half. I have some new ideas for class and some new concerns now more eloquently stated. They were good presentations.

Sandy gave two full-length talks and a pecha kucha talk at the conference and I will summarize my thoughts here. His first talk was on Critical Thinking, the second on activism and the pecha kucha was a sort of memoir. He was also interviewed by Koreabridge.

The two talks meshed together very well. He started by discussing faults in various textbooks, moved on to how to make better questions and activities then on to making those activities have real world applications.

Many books contain poorly thought graphs and charts that exist only to answer the very simple questions given. When looked at from a larger perspective, they become meaningless. The example he gave was of a chart of shopping by university students. Some students apparently hadn’t shopped in two months – how did they eat? The chart was bad but students could still be encouraged to discuss the problems. This fits with my long held belief that a book with many errors can be more valuable than a better edited one.

Sandy has a different suggestion. His idea is to think of useful activities then add language learning to them rather than try to make or simplify activities to fit preselected lesson plans.

“If critical thinking activities don’t have real world uses, they are just school work.”

“teaching =/= learning”

“Ask students ‘What did you learn today?””

“Add to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy ‘Share’ so the top four positions would be

‘Analyze, Evaluate, Create, Share'”

His second talk continued the theme. He wants to collaborate with other teachers and wants his students -and other students – to work together on various projects.

“Anything I can do, we can do better.”

He showed a video of an interview with him regarding one of his projects. He describes looking for “the best and smartest teachers…” Without showing any false modesty and only a little sarcasm, I wondered if I should start a group seeking “relatively smart and pretty good teachers”.

I was interested and I do feel inspired, but, looking back at the seminars, I begin to think there was a lot of feathers and not much chicken.

I had the same impression during his Pecha Kucha talk. To be fair, I had that same feeling for all the Pecha Kucha talks. The concept is interesting but I don’t know enough about it and haven’t seen enough to know if they are useful. A Pecha Kucha talk consists of a 400 second talk with a new slide appearing every twenty seconds. Within these haiku-like restrictions, people strive to offer useful information.

Sandy’s talk was funny and the slides were entirely of album cover images. I enjoyed it but I didn’t learn anything from it. I am not attacking him; the other talks were similarly amusing and content-free. I hope that Pecha Kucha can offer good content but I haven’t seen it yet.

I am hugely embarrassed that I had no idea of who Krashen was before the conference. A coworker told me that he hadn’t planned to go but since Krashen was speaking, he would probably go. Geez. Another huge lacuna in my knowledge of ESL.

On Sunday, I was chatting with Jeff Lebow of Koreabridge when this old guy walked up. Lebow leaped to his feet and organized a time for an interview with the man, calling him “Dr. Krashen”. Another embarrassment for me but now is a good time to offer a link to Lebow’s interview of Krashen.

His main point in his KOTESOL talk seemed to be that effective language learning can be achieved primarily through input. Reading books, listening to various forms of audio and watching TV and the like is the main way to learn a foreign language. Expensive and resource consuming lessons involving grammar, lectures and production of language don’t show value for money, he claims.

Learners won’t gain much from full-on native speaker language but need ‘comprehensible input’ and he suggests in the Lebow video that a ‘sheltered English’ TV channel would help.

At his talk, he used examples of people who have learned language from the study of grammar. Daniel Tammet was one example. The people who learned this way were exceptional and unlike the typical language student.

I understand and accept his claim but he only used one or two examples -it was, after all, a short talk – of people who learned through comprehensible input. Who can say that these examples were not also exceptional language learners, albeit in a different way?

I seem to have chosen not to study Korean in the way I should, but perhaps I merely need to read more of my son’s Korean books. That’s good news for me as a language learner. As a language teacher, this is terrible news.

Krashen even defends TV. Apparently, up to forty minutes a day of TV is beneficial and the problems associated with TV are only significant after four hours or more.

I am reminded of Dr. Semmelweis. He found that if a doctor simply washed his hands before surgery, the mortality rate of his patients would drop greatly. No one believed him and no one wanted to. I think Doctors who heard his claims didn’t want to believe him because if he were right, they had personally been responsible for many deaths.

I am not sure if I believe Krashen’s claims and I don’t see many people working to change language instruction in ways he suggests. I did not attend the extensive reading symposium at the conference because there is nothing at my university to encourage it.

I do feel that my own skill with English and large vocabulary are the result of great amounts of ‘free, voluntary reading’, a phrase he used in his talk.